In the January 3 issue of The New Yorker magazine, Adam Gopnik writes a beautiful piece about snowflakes: All Alike. Even then the winter weather had already taken a dramatic turn, and even then every school-age child in the Northeast was beginning to wonder about snow days. It turns out, contrary to most conventional wisdom, that snowflakes are really not so different as they are commonly believed to be. Gopnik writes as follows:

"As a snowflake falls, it tumbles through many different environments,” an Australian science writer named Karl Kruszelnicki explains. “So the snowflake that you see on the ground is deeply affected by the different temperatures, humidities, velocities, turbulences, etc, that it has experienced on the way.” Snowflakes start off all alike; their different shapes are owed to their different lives.

How humbling to realize that one of most basic assumptions about nature does not match up to the facts.  The science that backs up such a claim dates back to 1988, when a cloud scientist named Nancy Knight “took a plane up into the clouds over Wisconsin and found two simple but identical snow crystals, hexagonal prisms, each as like the other as one twin to another.”  Gopnik goes on, “Snowflakes, it seems, are not only alike; they usually start out more or less the same.”

This is an extraordinary but logical finding.  Just as snowflakes begin their journeys either as exactly identical or with very a similar six-fold (hexagonal) structure, young people begin their journeys with plenty of commonality as well.  People from all over the world share some very distinct biological characteristics as well as some strikingly universal psychological needs.  My strongest assumption is that we are equally humbled by the presence of a snowflake.

But we do not remain the same for very long, and herein lies the most interesting part of our story.  As Gopnik suggests, “Friends are like snowflakes: more different and more beautiful each time you cross their paths in our common descent.” For the final truth about snowflakes is that they become more individual as they fall—that, buffeted by wind and time, they are translated, as if by magic, into ever more strange and complex patterns, until, at last, like us, they touch earth. Then, like us, they melt.

I am hugely indebted to Adam Gopnik for his beautiful synthesis of poetry and science, of human connection and human understanding.  However, because I hold the honor of working with children every day, I offer one additional claim.  

I recognize that something magical happens during a child or snowflake’s unique journey through the atmosphere or womb, but I believe that something even more magical happens during the course of a child’s education.  To be precise, I believe that the connections that take place between students and teachers are even more transformative than the parallel influences of “the different temperatures, humidities, velocities, and turbulences” that affect the development of snowflakes.  Snowflakes are endlessly fascinating; children, even more so.

• Categories